mvpc | Model View Presenter Controller sample app | Architecture library

Just a note on usability: if you completely separate out the "actions" from the "view" (i.e. if your controller truly knows nothing about the UI components) things may get a little convoluted. For example, much of the time button actions will want to look at the state of text fields, etc. You certainly can do this by using your presenter to bind, say, the text in the text fields to data in the presentation model, and then letting the controller invoke a method on the model that references that state. The issue then is that the controller methods basically do nothing other than invoke equivalent methods on the presentation model; you end up with a layer that really is too thin and isn't pulling its weight, and the architecture looks over-engineered.

That said, if you do want to experiment with this, here's an approach that will work.

The main stumbling block here is that the FXMLLoader has a single controller instance associated with it. When it loads the FXML, it both injects elements with fx:id attributes into the controller, and associates "handler" methods in the controller with event handlers specified via onXXX attributes in the FXML.

The way you can make this work is to use the FXMLLoader's namespace, which is a map from fx:id values to the corresponding elements. So the approach I think will work is to use the default load process to associate the handlers with your controller, and then to use a bunch of reflection to initialize @FXML-annotated fields in your presenter from the values in the namespace.

The latter part of that looks like: